Back in January, standing at a podium in the bowels of a soon-to-be retired Georgia Dome, Aaron Rodgers issued a challenge of sorts.

“If this has taught us anything, it’s how important home-field advantage is,” Rodgers said. “We’ve played in three of these games, and they’ve all been on the road, and that’s just making it tough on yourself.”

It wasn’t the first time Rodgers talked about playing NFC title games at Lambeau. In 2015, during the aftermath of Green Bay’s inexplicable implosion in Seattle, the quarterback went as far as to say being the number one seed should absolutely be a goal for the Packers each year.

Fast-forward to Juley 2017, when Rodgers doubled down yet again in an interview with NFL Network.

“We’ve got to start faster. We didn’t start fast last year, we lost four in row in the middle there,” Rodgers said. “We’ve got to get those home playoff games again. We all feel like if we get that number one, number two seed and it’s coming through Green Bay in the playoffs, it makes it really tough on other teams.”

Missed opportunities in the regular season have been plentiful over the past three seasons, all of which came to an end somewhere other than Lambeau Field.

In 2014, the Packers lost a week three matchup in Detroit, 19-7, managing just 223 yards of offense against a Lions defense which featured a severely depleted secondary. Later that year, they dropped a 21-13 decision to a middling Buffalo Bills squad, the only smudge on a 7-1 finish to the season. Green Bay finished 12-4, losing out on the number one seed to Seattle by way of the conference record tiebreaker. We all know how that ended.

After starting 6-0 in 2015, the Packer offense seemingly caved in and the team lost four of their next five games, including home games against Detroit and Chicago. They failed to win the division for the first time in five seasons, and went into the playoffs as the fifth seed, where they knocked off Washington on the road before falling in Arizona.

Last season, the four game stretch Rodgers alluded to included a one-point loss to the Falcons and a home loss to Indianapolis—a game that featured a too little, too late rally from the Packers. Green Bay, of course, would eventually find themselves on the wrong side of an NFC Championship blowout in Atlanta.

In all three cases, just one more win would have vaulted the Packers to the next-highest seed come playoff time. While it doesn’t do much good to dwell on past results, the point remains: every game makes a difference.

That’s not to say the players and coaches in Green Bay don’t realize the importance of each and every game on the schedule, nor do they approach any game with complacency. There is, however, a certain faction of people who tend to view the early season as a “feeling out” period, where teams “jel” and “find their groove.”

If recent Packers history teaches us anything, it’s that teams are much better served to play with the same sense of urgency in week one as they do when they find themselves at 4-6 and on the brink of being eliminated from contention.

Sure, one loss early in the season may not mean a team will miss the playoffs. But how many times are playoff teams separated by one game or even a tiebreaker when seeding is determined? That one early loss starts to look a lot bigger when it’s the difference between playing at home or on the road in a playoff game.

Since one fateful Monday night in 2012, the Packers and Seahawks have developed what is probably the best inter-division rivalry in the NFC, if not the entire league. On that basis, it’s highly doubtful Green Bay will be lacking motivation when they kick off their 2017 season. If they should need anything extra, though, it wouldn’t hurt to consider whether they’d rather find themselves at CenturyLink Field or on the Frozen Tundra 18 or 20 weeks from now. If they play with that kind of urgency week in and week out, Aaron Rodgers may just get his home-field wish.